The role of skin colour in face recognition

Abstract

People have better memory for faces from their own racial group than for faces from other races. It has been suggested that this own-race recognition advantage depends on an initial categorisation of faces into own and other race based on racial markers, resulting in poorer encoding of individual variations in other-race faces. Here, we used a study--test recognition task with stimuli in which the skin colour of African and Caucasian faces was manipulated to produce four categories representing the cross-section between skin colour and facial features. We show that, despite the notion that skin colour plays a major role in categorising faces into own and other-race faces, its effect on face recognition is minor relative to differences across races in facial features.